22.1AIJun 14
STRIDE: Strategic Trajectory Reasoning via Discriminative Estimation for Verifiable Reinforcement LearningQinjian Zhao, Zhihao Dou, Dinggen Zhang et al.
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, existing RLVR methods typically rely on final-answer correctness to assign trajectory-level rewards, providing sparse supervision and treating all tokens uniformly regardless of their actual contribution to reasoning. Although recent studies introduce intermediate signals such as process rewards, high-entropy tokens, and semantic uncertainty, these signals are often not inherently verifiable and may fail to distinguish beneficial strategic patterns from harmful ones. To address this limitation, we propose STRIDE (Strategic Trajectory Reasoning with Discriminative Estimation), a fine-grained RLVR framework that derives strategic reasoning supervision from verifiable outcomes. STRIDE contrasts successful and failed trajectories within each response group to estimate the outcome-discriminative preference of each $n$-gram strategic pattern, and further combines this signal with reasoning saliency entropy to identify decision-relevant strategic patterns. These patterns are assigned differentiated advantage values during RL optimization, enabling more precise credit assignment while preserving the verifiability of RLVR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STRIDE consistently improves reasoning performance across diverse models, tasks, and extended settings, including VLMs and agent-based systems.
5.8LGJun 15
pFedUL: Layer-Aware Federated Unlearning for Personalized Federated LearningZhuodong Liu, Xiangyu Li, Zhihao Zhang
Federated unlearning (FU) enables the removal of specific data contributions from federated learning (FL) models to comply with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, most existing FU methods are designed for the FedAvg paradigm, where all clients share a single global model. In practice, personalized federated learning (pFL) methods such as FedPer, FedRep, Ditto, and FedBN have become widely adopted due to their superior handling of non-IID data. These methods decompose the model into shared global layers and client-specific personalized layers, fundamentally altering the semantics of unlearning, yet this setting has received little attention. We formalize FU under the pFL paradigm, identifying a tension between unlearning completeness on shared layers and personalization preservation for remaining clients. We then propose pFedUL, a layer-aware selective unlearning framework comprising three components: (1) gradient-based layer-wise contribution attribution that separately quantifies the target client's influence on shared and personalized parameters, (2) adaptive selective unlearning that applies differentiated forgetting strategies across layer types, and (3) a lightweight recalibration protocol enabling remaining clients to restore personalization with minimal overhead. We further introduce two new metrics, Personalization Preservation Score (PPS) and Cross-client Fairness Index (CFI), to evaluate pFL-specific unlearning quality. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and FEMNIST under varying non-IID settings indicate that pFedUL achieves unlearning effectiveness comparable to full retraining while maintaining an average of 97.3\% personalized accuracy for remaining clients. Compared with six state-of-the-art FU methods adapted to the pFL setting, pFedUL consistently achieves superior personalization preservation.
5.7SDJun 15
Dual-Granularity Orthogonal Disentanglement for Generalizable Audio Deepfake DetectionZhuodong Liu, Hugen Lv, Xiangyu Li et al.
Audio deepfake detectors often fail to generalize across speakers, as they learn speaker-identity features rather than synthesis artifacts, known as implicit identity leakage. Existing methods address this but incur architectural complexity or training instability. This paper proposes a dual-granularity orthogonal disentanglement framework enforcing feature independence at two levels: sample-level cosine orthogonality captures directional decorrelation, while batch-level cross-covariance regularization eliminates linear correlations across embedding dimensions. A curriculum disentanglement schedule progressively strengthens the orthogonality constraint without auxiliary networks or adversarial dynamics. Experiments on ASVspoof 2019 LA, ASVspoof 2021 DF, and In-the-Wild datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 1.35%, 7.88%, and 21.58% equal error rates (EER), respectively, surpassing gradient reversal disentanglement by 2.60% absolute on cross-dataset transfer.